VaccinItaly: monitoring Italian conversations around vaccines on Twitter

Pierri, Francesco; Pavanetto, Silvio; Brambilla, Marco; Ceri, Stefano

We monitor online conversations of Italian users around vaccines on Twitter, and we provide public access to the on-going data collection which will run continuously throughout the vaccination campaign taking place in Italy. We started collecting tweets matching vaccine-related keywords (in Italian) on December 20th 2020 using Twitter APIs, capturing the Italian vaccine rollout (27th December 2020), and at the time of this writing (13th January 2020) we collected over 1.8 M tweets, with an average number of 30k tweets shared on a daily basis. We report a consistent amount of low-credibility information already circulating on Twitter alongside vaccine-related conversations, whose prevalence is smaller yet comparable to high-credibility information. We believe that our data will allow researchers to understand the interplay between public discourse on online social media and the evolution of the on-going vaccination campaign against SARS-CoV-2 taking place in Italy.